I am not into self-exploration. My family would lose their eyes in the backs of their heads if people talked about personal journeys or finding oneself. I remember, as a teenager, a friend of mine saying that they were going to India or Thailand to find themselves and my brother retorting: “I bet, when you find yourself, you will tell you that you are a bit of a knob.” Reading self-help books or following lifestyle gurus was considered time wasted that you could have used throwing up a set of shelves. Changing the way you live your life and trying to be a better you was the very height of bourgeois nonsense.
It is, therefore, against every fibre of my culture that I write about the change I made, although I think even my cynical, dearly departed mother would approve. I made a decision to stop feeling envious of other people, to crack on with my life and stop comparing myself with others. It was not a natural progression as my life got better and more fulfilled – it was a conscious decision I came to through self-analysis. As I write that sentence, I can feel every member of my clan making a “wanker” gesture.
Oh well, I will take the ribbing, because it worked – I am happier. I had a nice life and no reason to feel envious, yet I did all the time. If a friend got a big promotion, I would outwardly congratulate them, but inside I would painfully compare myself with them and think that their success was a reflection on my failings.
When my children were little, I would chat with my husband or my mum friends about how we were superior parents to other people, or that so-and-so was lying about how their children slept through the night. For new parents, the comparison game gets down to a ridiculous level of minutiae, where people end up puffing their chests out because their kids drink more milk than some other kid. The fight always seems biggest when the stakes are the smallest.
The moment I realised that envy and jealousy were poisoning me was after the death of my mother. I was in my 20s when she died and my eldest brother was in his 40s. He had lost his mum just like I did, but I felt he deserved to be less sad because he had had her longer. It is reasonable to lose a parent in your 40s. Older colleagues would share tales of having to care for their elderly mothers and I would wish that their mum had died instead of mine. Poisonous stuff.
Rationally, I knew that other people being sad would not make my life better, but still I felt like a stamping toddler shouting: “It’s not fair!” In the end, it was the words of my mother that pulled me out of this fug and made me change. I was in the middle of proper teenage amateur dramatics about how my naughty brother got all of the attention for his drug addiction and his troublesome school record, how being good and doing the right thing was never rewarded, but getting banged up by the police for nicking car radios seemed to win all my parents’ attention. She just said: “Would you want to swap places with him? Being you is the benefit you get.”
After months of grief and pain at losing her, I realised that comparing myself with people who had different lives was wasteful, and all I could really do was make myself happy. So I made the change.
Now, when a friend gets a ridiculously well-paid promotion, or seemingly gets to have all the benefits I have but (in my warped view) doesn’t have to do any of the work, or is off on a trip I would kill to go on but can’t because of the kids, I am just happy for them. I think: “How very lovely.”
A change well made.
Jess Phillips is the MP for Birmingham Yardley
Read more stories of change in the G2 special issue A new start on 31 December
